Heuristic Triggers — LLM Prompting for PMs, Vol. 1

As a product manager, you know the pain of constantly switching context. One hour, you’re deciding which feature to ship next. The next, you’re whipping up a quick PRD or answering an urgent Slack from your CEO asking, “How do we compare to XYZ on this feature?” Yes, the context-switching is crazy ,but that is exactly where AI can offer leverage.

If you know anything about prompting, you know that generic prompts like “write a PRD” or “analyze this competitor” is not enough. The outputs tend to be fluffy, vague, or just wrong, personally, it annoys me.

Well, today, we’ll be solving that problem with Heuristic triggers.

Heuristic triggers are simply short, familiar cues that tell the AI how to think, not just what to do. They act like mental shortcuts. Just like you use frameworks (80/20, SWOT, INVEST) to get clarity fast, you can inject those same cues into your prompts to force AI into structured, high-signal thinking.

In this first article of our series on Advanced prompting for Product managers, we’ll break down how heuristic triggers work, and how you can use them as a product manager to move faster and think sharper.

Here are 3 real-world PM problems, and how heuristic triggers solve them:

1. Scenario 1:
   You’re in roadmap mode with 10 features competing for your team’s time. You don’t have 2 days to run a full RICE analysis—but you still need direction. the biggest question haunting you is “What Should We Build Next?”

Prompt (with heuristic trigger):
List the top 3 features from this list using the 80/20 rule. Focus on business impact and dev effort.

Why it works:
The “80/20 rule” is a classic heuristic that activates a bias for high-leverage work. It tells the AI: “Only show me the few things that matter most.” In seconds, you get a sharp prioritization draft to refine with your team. No spreadsheet needed.

2. Scenario 2:
   You’re jumping into a handoff meeting with engineering, but you forgot to write the one-pager for that new feature. The one thought in your head as you head into the meeting is “I need a Doc in the next 15 Minutes, especially since engineers forget everything you’ve told them before you leave the room.”

Prompt (with heuristic trigger):
Write a one-pager PRD using the INVEST criteria for a feature that <mention the problem the feature solves>.

Why it works:
INVEST (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable) is a product standard. This trigger forces the model to structure the PRD in a way that is more familiar to engineers. Instead of a wall of text, you get a tidy, dev-friendly document ready for Jira or Notion.

3. Scenario 3:
   Your CEO is breathing down your neck, there is a feature to launch but he wants to know “How do we compare to X competitor on This feature?” You’ve got 30 minutes to answer, but you have no recent analysis, and little energy for bullshit left.

Prompt (with heuristic trigger):
Summarize the competitive landscape using a SWOT analysis for [Feature] in the [Industry] space.

Why it works:
“SWOT” tells the AI to organize its thoughts into Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This structure lets you spot strategic gaps and quickly extract insights.

Why This Matters
Heuristic triggers shifts an LLM from being a task follower to a thinking partner. It’s the difference between asking a junior intern for help versus a senior PM who speaks your language. The right trigger gives you high-leverage output with fewer edits and faster turnaround.

‣ Pro Tip: Start Building a Trigger Toolkit
Keep a running list of heuristic triggers you use in everyday work:

• 80/20 rule (for ruthless prioritization)

• SWOT (for structured analysis)

• INVEST (for clean PRDs)

• First Principles (for product strategy)

• Jobs To Be Done (for user discovery)

These aren’t just frameworks, they’re prompt power-ups.

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Next in the series: Multi-Role Collisions — how to get the AI to argue like your engineer, user, and stakeholder all at once (so you can stress-test decisions before the meeting even starts).

Till I see you again, Keep winning at the game of product.